Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  When Buchanan finally looked up, Hadrian spoke first. “You don’t need me. You’ve already settled everything. Jonah succumbed to a suicidal compulsion. You decreed that the fire was unrelated. Hastings’s body by now is no doubt under a thousand feet of water. You’ve done what you do best when reality overtakes you. Manipulate the truth in the name of public order.”

  Buchanan was silent a long time. Low voices rose from out in the hall. Hadrian’s eyes widened as he turned and saw the policeman at the reception desk being relieved, handing over his pistol to a tall blond bull of a man.

  “My god!” he said. “You think you’re next.”

  Buchanan rose. “No one comes in, Bjorn,” he instructed his new sentry, then shut the door.

  “You tell the colony Jonah was a suicide,” Hadrian spoke slowly, studying the governor, seeing now the lines of worry around his eyes. “But behind closed doors you fear the killer.”

  The governor stood at the window, gazing out over the inland sea, grey and choppy under a brisk autumn wind. “These are unsettled times. I haven’t endured all these years just to have a blade shoved in my ribs.”

  Hadrian’s mind raced. “Something in Jonah’s death frightens you.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “The killer must be stopped.”

  “You’ve told the world there is no killer. So there is no one to stop. We have no murders in our paradise on earth.”

  “You can stop him.” Buchanan’s face was tight. “You must stop him.”

  “Tell me, Lucas, why would I want to do that?” Hadrian asked.

  The governor spun about. Hadrian half expected him to leap at him across the desk. Buchanan paused, taking a deep breath. “I’m giving you your freedom,” he replied in a simmering voice. “No banishment.”

  “My sentence is up in four days anyway. We both know with the stroke of a pen you could make me an exile five minutes after I walk out the door.”

  “It shall be recorded in the Council’s ledger. No exile. Official freedom to come and go. An expression of our gratitude for the way you helped at the fire.”

  “I’m not sure I want to live in your colony anymore.”

  Buchanan’s eyes burnt into Hadrian’s. “Damn you! What do you want?”

  “My armband comes off. Stop putting your slogans on the walls. And the bridge. You promised Jonah to build one over the west ravine.”

  “You go too far! You will not dictate the use of public resources.”

  “After the bridge, there will have to be a road. Then wagons of grain. The colony silos will be overflowing soon.”

  “Ridiculous! That grain is our lifeblood! Without it we’d never survive the winter. I keep telling the Council we must expand the plantings.”

  “More has been harvested than ever before.”

  “And we have more mouths to feed.”

  Hadrian stared at him. “You never intended to construct the bridge,” he finally said. “You lied to Jonah, to appease him. My grandfather once told me that a lie to a dead man always comes back to haunt the living.”

  “It’s impossible. The people won’t allow it. You know how they hate the slags.”

  “Only because you taught them to.” Hadrian rose as if to leave. “I can wait until my sentence is up, then disappear into the forest, let you spend the next year jumping at every shadow. I wonder what people will think when suddenly they see you surrounded by bodyguards after you’ve already assured them Jonah’s death was just another suicide.”

  Buchanan grimaced. He was clearly struggling to keep his voice level. “We must get the new roof on the library.”

  “Split the crews. But I won’t do your dirty work for you until I see work begun on the bridge. Jonah already gave you a set of drawings. First come the anchor piers on this side of the ravine . . .”

  “Extortion of the governor is treason.”

  “There’s no such law. It will be fascinating to hear how you explain to the Council why you need one now.”

  Buchanan seemed to flinch at the mention of the Council. His hold over the supreme political body of the colony was tenuous. He had firm control over only three of its seven votes, and the vacancy caused by Jonah’s death meant even more uncertainty.

  “Go back to the hole you crawled out of,” Buchanan said through clenched teeth.

  Hadrian shrugged. “The killers left a knife on Jonah’s table. Did you see it? An old sword, cut down, heavy and sharp as a razor. A blade like that will slice your heart in half before you even feel it.”

  A CITY WORKER was lighting the fish oil lanterns hanging at each street corner. Hooves clattered on cobblestones. A bawdy song rose from a tavern near the waterfront. A horse nickered in a stable. Hadrian, enjoying his newfound freedom, paused to watch the moon rise over the endless water, then slipped through the rear door of an L-shaped log and stone building, the largest in the colony except for Government House.

  The woman who sat at the kitchen table by the huge woodburning stove didn’t see him at first. Her brunette hair, streaked with grey, hung over her face. She stared wearily into the steaming mug in her hands. The white apron she wore was frayed and stained with blood.

  “I’m sorry about shoving you away at the library, Emily,” he said softly.

  Her head came up slowly as she straightened her hair and scrubbed at her cheeks. The sturdy, unshakable head of the colony’s hospital had been crying.

  “Did you, Hadrian?” she said. “I didn’t notice.”

  “You’re lying, but thank you.”

  It had been four months after the founding of the colony when Hadrian had found Emily ten miles inland, caring for three dying children in a cave. He had stayed with her until their struggle ended, then dug the graves before bringing Carthage its first doctor. During the past year they’d sat up many nights nursing Jonah through his bouts of illness. She rose now and poured him tea from the pot on the stove.

  “I just came to beg a little soap and water.”

  Emily lifted an oil lamp toward Hadrian and winced. “A little? Weeks in jail, hauling old manure?” She jabbed a finger into his chest, pushing him onto the back veranda, then pointed to a metal bathtub sitting in a corner. She cut off his protest with an upraised hand. “You are not going to bury Jonah smelling like a latrine.”

  A quarter hour later Hadrian was luxuriating in hot water from the tank attached to the stove. A match flared as Emily settled into a rocking chair ten feet away and lit a small tobacco pipe.

  “He was murdered, Em,” Boone said.

  “I am the known world’s foremost authority on the damage done by hanging nooses. Asphyxiation by rope was the official cause of death.”

  “He would never commit suicide. Not Jonah. Life was too precious to him. He had too many unfinished projects.”

  “Above all here in Carthage we know the pathology of the human spirit. I could give you twenty reasons why he might suddenly give up. His arthritis was getting worse by the day. Do you have any idea what constant pain can do to you?”

  “Give up and also try to burn his life’s work?”

  “Half a dozen reasons.”

  “Of all the scenarios you could postulate, surely murder is at least one of them.”

  The head of the Carthage hospital was quiet a long time, gazing at the tobacco smoke that drifted through the moonlight. “Two of his fingers were broken. There were marks on his upper arm where someone with a hand like a vise had gripped him.”

  Hadrian lowered his voice. “Does Buchanan know?”

  “He was there when I cleaned the body. I showed him. He immediately reminded me that murder was a legal construct, not a medical concept, then insisted the injuries were made when Jonah dropped to the floor from the rafter. When I disagreed, he said we had a duty not to panic the population, that Jonah would want his death to be used for the betterment of the colony.”

  Hadrian leaned back in his cocoon of warm water and moonlight. Near the horizon a trail of sparks marked the la
te return of one of the steam fishing vessels. Above it the aurora shimmered. Jonah had kept his astrophysics alive by studying the northern lights and had been writing a scholarly pamphlet on why their display had increased over the past generation.

  It was Emily who broke their silence. “An old man died out here last week,” she said in a melancholy tone. “He had no family left, made his way as a carpenter, but in his spare time he tried to start little churches. Baptist first, then Episcopal. The final attempt was Buddhist. They always failed. He came out here on his last night. I found him dead at dawn, leaning against a post, looking upward. In his lap he had left a slip of paper. I thought it was going to be a prayer or a last bequest. After the earth was in ashes, it said, I could see the stars more clearly.”

  “Jonah was the best of us, Em,” Hadrian said after a long silence. He wasn’t sure she had heard him.

  When she spoke at last it was in a whisper. “He was always about getting on with life. The world may have ended for the rest of us, but he treated it like a bad accident we had to just walk away from.”

  “At first I thought it was because he was callused,” Hadrian replied. “But I quickly learned that wasn’t true. It was just courage. More than I ever had.”

  “I read old books on psychiatry. Sometimes I think we are as disabled on the inside as the exiles are on the outside. But not Jonah. I never knew how he did it. As if he were the last real human on earth.”

  “On his body, was there anything else? A knife wound?”

  “More like a line where blood vessels had been crushed, high on his neck, but just a shallow cut. A knife could have done it, held close to the neck. Nothing else remarkable. Just some blotches of color on his lips. Little brown and purple spots. An allergy, perhaps.”

  As Hadrian puzzled over her words, Emily stood. “There are clean clothes on the chair by the door, and you can use the bed in the exam room off the kitchen, provided you give me ten minutes first. Second floor, north corner.”

  She was taking the pulse of a young man when Hadrian arrived upstairs. Her patient was barely out of his teens, a handsome youth whose face strangely sagged along the left side. Emily lifted his left arm and dropped it. The limb was lifeless.

  “Not a mutation, not a birth defect?” Hadrian asked.

  The doctor shook her head. “His name is Jamie Reese. He’s worked in the fishing fleet for years, the son of the captain of the Zeus, one of the old sailing trawlers. His crew found him like this on his bunk one morning. If he were fifty years older, I’d say it was a stroke. There’s paralysis, probably nerve damage. He can’t talk, can’t write. Drifts in and out of this coma.”

  “He could have been hit on the head, but the concussion had a delayed effect.”

  “That’s how it was first reported. But there’s no sign of a blow. None of his crew would talk when I went to the docks to ask about a possible accident.”

  “Reese . . . Why do I know that name?”

  “The hero from the sinking of the Anna. He was one of the two survivors. Saved the captain.”

  Hadrian looked at the patient with new interest. The Anna had been the first of the colony’s steamboats, lost in a storm more than a year earlier. Reese and the captain had survived in a dinghy for several days before being picked up by another fishing boat. He paced around the bed, lifting the youth’s arms, pushing back the sleeves.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know. A tattoo. Or a mark of some kind.”

  “His mother came every day at first, but she’s stopped. She was quite emotional. I thought it was grief, but on her last visit it was more like fear. Two men came yesterday, smelling of fish. They wouldn’t step into the room, just looked at him from the door. I asked what was wrong. They asked if he would live. When I said he probably would they didn’t seem relieved, they just backed away.”

  Hadrian now noticed a leather strap around the fisherman’s neck and pulled it out. It held a piece of tin stamped with an image, a wolf on two legs. But unlike the medallion gripped by the dead scout, this wolf stood in a tree. Not a wolf, he suspected now, but one of the vicious pine martens that had multiplied in recent years. A tree jackal. Jackals run with ghosts.

  “Do you know this?”

  “Just a cheap piece of jewelry.”

  “No. It’s more. The mark I was looking for.” He studied the youth again. Reese had been feted for his heroism after the shipwreck, would have had his choice of jobs in the fishery. “The two visitors. Did you know them?”

  Emily shrugged. “They smelled of fish. And something else—spices. Cloves and cinnamon. I assumed they were friends of his. They asked how he fared and I said he should survive.”

  “What sort of friends stand in the hall and point?”

  The doctor gave another weary shrug. “Fishermen and hunters get more superstitious every year. Haven’t you heard? We’re retreating backward in time, reversing history. We’ll have witch trials and exorcisms before long.”

  Hadrian stepped to the end of the bed and laid the shreds of paper from his pocket on the blanket. “These were under Jonah’s desk.”

  “Hadrian, I don’t have time.”

  He held up a restraining hand and assembled the scraps quickly, then pointed to the missing arcs along the right margin. “Brown and purple spots, you said.”

  The doctor cocked her head, then lifted a piece from the margin to study under the oil lamp.

  “Brown and purple ink. He bit off these pieces before he died.”

  Emily’s brow creased with worry as she nodded her agreement. “But it’s nothing,” she said as she quickly scanned the pieces on the bed. “A diary.”

  “Jonah spent hours on this. A different page each week,” he explained. “All I know for sure is that there’s more to it than you and I can see.” He gazed at the comatose sailor, then tore a slip of paper from the chart hanging from a peg by the bed and quickly wrote a note. “Give this to the governor in the morning.”

  As Emily read the note her mouth twisted as if she had bit into something sour. “A police guard? He’ll never agree.”

  “You’re on the Council.”

  “Why would I want some brute in uniform hovering over this poor boy?”

  Hadrian stepped toward the door, fighting an overwhelming fatigue. “To protect the truth,” he said, and slipped away.

  AN HOUR AFTER dawn he found Emily back in the kitchen, instructing her nurses at the big table by the stove. She offered him a haggard smile as he poured himself tea. The only other medical personnel to have found their way to Carthage had been a chiropractor, a dentist, and two medical students. She was not only the head physician and hospital administrator but also chief instructor of its fledgling medical school.

  Outside, he drank the strong brew and braced himself for the painful day ahead. The scent of fresh loaves wafted up from a bakery near the port. Trawlers were leaving the wharves half a mile up the shore. From the edge of town, cows mooed. The mechanical breath of a steam thresher starting its day’s work rose in the distance. He drained his mug, set it inside, and began climbing the hill.

  At the library crews were clearing out the debris from the fire. They said nothing, only stepped aside as he mounted the stairs. Jonah’s workshop lay in ruin, apparently untouched, cordoned off by a rope at the entry. Charred roof shingles cracked underfoot. The old man’s precious collections lay scattered about. Books lay in pools of water. The marks of heavy boots stained the shelves where firefighters had climbed to aim their hose.

  He circled the big table, despairing of finding any evidence in the chaos, struggling once more to visualize the chamber as it had been when he discovered his old friend’s body, before the fire and fire crews had destroyed it. Hadrian could see the fresh chips on the rafter where he’d hacked away the hanging rope. He found the knife where he had tossed it against the back wall. Lifting it now, he admired the finely worked hilt, noted the mark of a Philadelphia maker and a date. 1861. As Nash
had explained, such a blade was too useful to have been preserved simply because of its Civil War vintage. It had been ground down to a size that made it useful for assaulting old men.

  He stuck the blade into his belt, his heavy wool shirt concealing it, then studied the chamber again. The desk had been moved nearly two feet to position it under the rafter. There were footprints on it, those of the flat-soled shoes worn by Jonah but also boot prints. It would have taken two men to move the heavy desk. There had been at least two killers. With the knife at his throat, the scientist had been forced to step onto the chair, then the desk, had stood as the noose was tightened, and then been shoved off the makeshift scaffold. But if they had had such a knife, why go to the trouble of the hanging?

  He touched the scraps of Jonah’s journal in his pocket. There must have been a moment when he had seen them coming, had recognized their intention. He could have run to the balcony to call for help. But instead he had grabbed his illuminated page and taken two bites out of it, then ripped up the remainder.

  Hadrian paced slowly along the shelves. Most of Jonah’s prize exhibits had been damaged or destroyed. He ran his finger along the edge of several shelves, wiping away the soot on the inscriptions his friend had carved into the edges of the thick boards. KNOWLEDGE IS THE CONTAGION THAT ALL TYRANTS FEAR, he read, then WONDER IS THE BEGINNING OF ALL LEARNING. He picked up the stuffed grouse, broken beyond repair in the chaos of that night. One leg had been broken off, the other barely attached. Its head was gone. He paused. The head had been severed. He pulled out the knife, examining the blade, finding a tiny feather pressed against the hilt. He picked up another animal, and another. Each had been mutilated. For Jonah, it would have been like witnessing torture. On the floor were the remains of the intricate model observatory. It had been sliced into splinters.

  A low moan escaped Hadrian’s throat as he recalled Emily’s report of broken fingers. They had not come to kill Jonah. They’d come to torture him, to obtain something from him. Knowing how treasured his exhibits and models were, they had begun by mutilating them. Jonah may have been weak in body but his was the strongest spirit Hadrian had ever known. Even after breaking his fingers, even after slicing into the skin of his neck with the knife, his torturers had failed. They had attacked his collections, held the knife to his throat, put the noose around his neck. But the old scholar would have shown no fear, would not have given them the satisfaction of begging for his life or bargaining with what it was they sought. Jonah had taken two bites of his page and let them hang him. But why burn the library, he asked himself as he lifted a book from the floor and returned it to a shelf.